Sunday, January 20, 2013

"Now give me back my dog."

A cowboy named Mark was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when
suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?”

Mark looks at the man, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, Why not?”

The man parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his iPhone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location, which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his iPhone that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his iPhone and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says Mark.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

Then Mark says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

“You’re a Congressman”, says Mark.“Wow! That’s correct,” says the man, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required.” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used thousands of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter you are than I am; and you don’t know a thing about how working people make a living – or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep. ….

You really, really need to find out how GPS works. "Calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location" -- I think not. And GPS is Air Force, not NASA. And the old Greyhound bus joke is funnier.